Blue Ray Region Lock Question

[Slawek]

G'day..

I'm from Canada but living in Australia, and I'm coming to visit in a few weeks. My friend here in Sydney wants to get a Sony Vaio laptop, but they're TWICE the price here! So he wants to build it from Sony Store and ship it to my Canadian residence.

Anyway no worries, I can bring it back for him. He is buying a top end laptop with Blue Ray burner and stuff.. he already bought a PS3 when he was in NY a few years back and it's region locked, so he can not play his Aussie Blue Ray movies.

Our concern/question:

1) If I bring the laptop back to Australia, will the Blue Ray rom be region locked, or will it work like a DVD-ROM and allow up to 5 region changes? I emailed the company that makes DVD Region+CSS Free and they said "soon they will have Blue Ray support".

He does not want to buy this laptop if he can't watch his Aussie Blue Ray movies on a North American drive.

2) Will he have warranty over here with Sony? I doubt it, just wondering tho.


Thanks for the help!!

[ADRiiAN`]

1) Very few Blu Ray's are Region Free. Australia is region B whereas North America is Region A.

Now with laptops and computers, it's like magic. I have an HP laptop, that has a blu ray drive in, and you can change the region code up to 5 times. So I believe that if you buy a Sony Vaio with a Blu ray, and it's Region A, then in the properties of the Blu Ray drive, it will have a list of countries and you can choose Australia which will change your region through the properties to Region B.

If someone can 100% confirm that for me though, because i've always thought that region encoding was a hardware thing.

2) He will have Sony Canada's warranty. So if anything goes wrong, he'll have to ship it back to Canada to get it fixed. You can take a product anywhere in the world, but the country where it's bought from, has to be serviced there. (With some companies, it could be different)

[Calmuser]

have him buy anydvd HD then the region lock won't matter. he will be able to play any region of blu-ray movies.